via dolorosa
by bellmare
Summary: they can't win. they won't win, they can never win no matter how many timelines they've repeated. —Puella Magi Madoka Magica AU, Persona 3/4; Souji, ensemble.


**For the Persona 4 kink meme on Livejournal – a crossover with Puella Magi Madoka Magica, in which **_**everyone **_**is a magical girl. Or boy. Hell, I don't know.**

**Spoilers for the True Ending. **

* * *

><p>It's the end of another cycle and they still can't win.<p>

"Partner."

He half-turns. Yosuke's grinning at him, though it looks more and more like a grimace as the world around them cracks and splits. He tries to force a smile back but his face feels frozen, his lips are numb and he can feel his teeth chattering—whether out of fear or cold, Souji isn't sure.

"Partner … I'm glad to have been able to fight alongside you."

He swallows thickly, feeling the panic bubble and coalesce beneath his ribs. They've come so far, only to lose so many along the way. Countless times, he's stood in this exact spot, waiting for the right moment to turn back time and try to go back to see what he's gone wrong. Countless times, he's had this same conversation, only each time it's been with someone else, a different person standing alongside him as they square their shoulders and prepare for the inevitable. "Don't talk like that—it's. It's not auspicious."

His friend chuckles, then bends double as his shoulders are racked by a fit of hacking coughs. When he straightens, his hand is spotted with blood; when he catches Souji's eye, he pointedly lowers his arm, letting it hang limply by his side. "H-heh, only you'd say something like that when death is upon us."

The air is full of the _creak-creak_ of bone, bending and snapping and popping. As one, they look up and the witch rears back, skeletal hands clawing, black hair whipping around gaunt cheekbones. Her voice is harsh as breaking glass, high and keening and cracking. It sings in his bones a lilting song of destruction, of desolation, of overwhelming hopelessness.

They won't win. They can't win.

Izanami-no-Okami is the most powerful witch they have ever faced. She's the most powerful Souji's ever tried to fight against over countless doomed timelines where everyone around him dies, cut down one way or another before they can even retaliate.

(_Blue butterflies, hovering around his wrist, circling the handle of his sword, plunged through the blistered earth so he has something to steady himself with. Blue butterflies, here to save him and help him grant his own wish. It's time._)

His hands shake, palm slipping off his sword. The hourglass embedded in its pommel gleams, flashing blue, bright and spectral. His time is almost up.

He's failed again.

"Hey, partner."

Yosuke's standing still now, eyes fixed upon the witch, headphones looped around his neck. He's clutching his soul gem in one hand, so tightly he might shatter it, knuckles white over the tiny orange-amber oval. It's spotted black, stained brown, dark as molasses. He throws his head back and breathes in the air – it reeks of death and despair and decay, of rust and blood and acrid smoke – and rubs absently at the gem, shoulders trembling.

Writhing familiars arise from Izanami-no-Okami's barrier, taking forms they're both familiar with—to his left, a smiling Chie with yellow eyes dances towards him, shifting restlessly from foot to foot, the metal of her greaves dull and tarnished; alongside her rises a twisted parody of Yukiko, unfolding her fan with a snap. Teddie's coattails flutter around his ankles, black and flaking with ash. His eyes are yellow, bright as coins, bright as cursed gold.

Dread pools in the pit of his stomach—it's all Souji can do to tear his eyes away from the doppelgangers of his fallen friends. "Yeah?"

"Looks like this is the end, huh?"

"Don't—don't say that. If it's the end, we'll face it together."

Yosuke laughs tiredly and runs his hands through his hair. Darkness puddles and bubbles beneath their feet, and Souji knows this is how their world will end—again.

(_Another chance, another opportunity to stand and fight. What's worse? Doing nothing and dying and letting Izanami-no-Okami ravage the world, or repeating the cycle and fighting a futile battle again?_)

Phantom hands grab at his ankles and claw at his shins, nails raking across his skin, painting bloody gouges down his legs. He tilts his head up, staring at a red-black sky pale with fog.

"It was nice knowing you."

At the corner of his eye, something moves—and then he's lurching aside, winded and staggering as Yosuke throws his shoulder against him and knocks him away from the dead zone of grasping hands and grave earth. The soil is gritty against his chin, foul and reeking of bones and ash.

"No—!"

Yosuke only smiles widely, and for an instant Souji's not seeing his friend as he is now, face wan and grime-streaked and mottled with blood. For an instant, it's a rumple-haired boy tapping his toes to a beat only he can hear as he dozes in class, head pillowed in his arms.

"Here," he says, soft and clear, and throws something dark and pointed at Souji. He instinctively moves to catch it as twitching, dead hands reach up and pull his friend down, down, down. Yosuke holds out his soul gem, stained and blackened, tossing it, and even though those clawed hands are tearing at him he's smiling, smiling so broadly. It sails through the air and Souji moves instinctively, sword-edge slicing through a blur of orange.

Something cracks—Yosuke's soul gem, his spine, his headphones, _something_ which gives way and snaps with a sound that's both brittle and sharp.

He's alone now—nothing's left of his friend but fragments of amber glass and a twisted cage of burnished metal, scattered around his feet like so much rubble.

Souji glances down at the object clenched in his hand—it's Rise's grief seed, spiked and multifaceted, opalescent in the gloom. His soul gem is almost black, the colour of stormclouds in the night sky—and getting darker by the second, threatening to turn.

Once, a long time ago, he was shown a timeline where he turned—Izanami-no-Okami as felled in a single heartbeat, but the thing, the witch he became, it was by far worse than her, swallowing the world in his own despair far quicker than she ever had.

(_Blue butterflies, hovering before his eyes. One more chance. As many as it took._)

He can feel his eyes prickling, but when he lifts his arm to swipe away the tears he knows should be there, it comes away dry. "Thanks," he murmurs to empty air as he presses the grief seed to his soul gem, watching as it begins to glow again.

The witch turns to him. The world beneath his feet melts and distorts. He grips his sword and thumbs at the guard, and turns. Gears click.


End file.
